Living Books: The Incidental Bonus of Playing with Multimedia

摘要

The story-telling multimedia, Living Book, is one of the most common edutainment genres, in which children hear and play with interactive and animated stories, in a highly-engaging multimedia environment. Living Books are designed so that that every word of the story is projected as text on the computer monitor simultaneously with its narration. This enables listeners to synchronize between the audio and textual representation of words and thus to learn their pronunciation and understand their meaning. This article presents results of a study which showed that young children who did not know how to speak or read the English language became proficient in pronunciation and gained a high level of understanding by playing with Living Books. Results show that the participants were able to correctly pronounce almost 70% of the words in the Living Book and could identify the meaning of about 70% of them. On the other hand, it was found that they were able to read words as orthographic units but not to identify individual letters (average of 6.25%). Our findings point to the potential for incidental learning in highly-interactive, engaging and playful multimedia environments, such as Living Books.